Today was mostly working on implementing the balancing concepts that we learned from the readings from the previous week. Using them, we accomplished balancing our game and updated our prototype. The other accomplishment with this is that we have prepared the game to be play tested, which will be occurring sometime this week. We also determined our leveling system, or in another sense, determined that progression will not occur with levels. Instead, a player will gain point to advance skills to ...

This game can be broken up into four acts. The first act is a little easier, possibly to get players into the game. Most of the monsters do not have specials and are weaker to make up for the players lacking special abilities. However, once the player gets to the second stage the monsters pick up in their difficulty and gain several abilities which prove a challenge for certain character types. For example, I had a hard time with wasps which do a lot of long range damage that is hard to avoid. W ...

Today we began the process of prototyping our game. After flushing out a few things, we began playing out our attack simulation representing the actual combat within the game. By doing this we found several potential issues and problems with our system, which we modified and fixed. The major two changes was that the three types of blocks became a standard block which would stun the opponent and allow extra damage on the next "turn" within the simulation. Beyond this, we also brainstormed prototy ...

We began by looking at the what was required of us for the the Symposium presentation within a few weeks. After finding out that we need to do an abstract, we went on to flush out very concise paragraphs on what we have been researching this summer. After accomplishing this we moved on to finalize our attack prototypes and take another look over our Treatment document, which are both pretty much finalized. David also made some progress on the technologies research for the treatment document as w ...

Today we just finished the first draft of the high concept and treatment documents. This mainly involved converting all of our FOSS integration concepts into paragraph form, then discussing the exploits that could be problematic with such FOSS integration. Finally, we did a few checks for both of the documents to fix grammatical errors and fill in the last of the information throughout the documents. ...

Today we continued working on the high concept and treatment documents. Their first draft is almost completely done. All that is left are a few sections which need to be reworked and Oddshock's tech information that needs to be added. To get to this stage, we had to go through a few more discussions so that we had a very good understanding about what the game will be like. This involved finalizing the money, crafting, and trading materials that are game will use. We also had to finalize how play ...

Things have been quite a blur since starting graduate studies in the fall. Cycles are scarce. Pressure is high. The plate has been piled higher than ever. My "happy place" has been elusive. Sometimes, you just gotta write effing code. Being able to pip install any library under the sun and cobble together an app or script that just does what you want it to do is one of the best feelings in the world. Like an artist painting with every color of the python rainbow, or a carpenter with every t ...

Today we accomplished a lot of revision and compilation work. After a meeting with SJ we learned that our story was a little to similar to the Tron story, so we molded it while keeping the overall mechanics and game play style in place. What we came up with is an abandoned earth in which sentience is given to robots, allowing them to expand out from the human cities. Above and beyond this, we started compiling a lot of our work into the treatment document. We now have a rough overview for most o ...

Today we each developed a setting that our game would take place in. The goal was to come up with logical settings that would work with our mechanics and FOSS integration we plan on implementing. We also decided on a final setting, which became a mesh of my, Francis's, and David's setting ideas. We also went through the setting again to make sure that this final setting would work with all of the FOSS integration. Finally, we came up with some concept art for this final setting as well. Today w ...

Today was a good work day in that we got a lot nailed down, plus planned out the next one or two weeks. We mainly did this with our meeting with SJ, in which we concluded that this week will be devoted to finalizing the design, setting, concept, and a basic understanding of the FOSS integratione we plan on implementing. As we finalize these things, we also be writing several drafts of the Concept Document and the Treatment Document to display a good, precise overview of our game. From these, we ...